My Breasts Never Grew, But I've Forgiven Them

I can still see the rosy pink shade of the tee-shirt I was wearing the afternoon in fourth grade when I stuck my face down into it and made an incredible discovery: I had boobs. Or the beginnings of them, at least.

I could hardly contain my excitement. These little buds, I thought, were the first hint of the real woman who would emerge from my awkward girl's body. I would be tall and lean, and my breasts would perfectly fill out the most elegant dresses. I would be the sort of woman who stopped a room just by entering.

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But not so fast. They quit as soon as I discovered them, but the truth is that my breasts might have grown a little bit more over the next few years. Enough to justify the purchase of a 32AA training bra.

In the sixth grade, I got the thrill of my first period–although, frankly, I was disappointed by the light flow. I had been hoping for something more dramatic. Something that meant I was growing up. Getting my period meant that all the hormones were in gear, and the real development of my breasts would begin.

But it simply never happened.

I tried every variety of padded and push-up bra I could find in the lingerie section, desperate to make nothing into something. I remember finding a very heavily padded bikini one summer. It was basically like putting on a pair of falsies. I wore it once, on an overnight school trip, and for a few hours I looked just like all the other fourteen-year-old girls.

I graduated from high school and then from college, but never from my AA cup size. They looked unfinished, as though there had been no progress at all since the fourth grade. Like some sort of cruel joke.

I changed lightning fast in the locker room, and, otherwise, tried not to think about them.

Many years later, after having settled into a life with my partner, I started trying to get pregnant. As though taking their cue from my breasts, my ovaries were uncooperative. After a hellish series of fertility procedures, finally, I was pregnant. I was going to become a mother. More immediately, though, I was going to get boobs!

Pregnancy is the holy grail of boobs–everyone knows that. So I waited and waited for them to swell. And I kept waiting. Nine months passed. Finally, they puffed up a bit. I gave birth, and fed my son the yellow colostrum they produced for his first few days of life.

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Courtesy of Marie Holmes

I couldn't enjoy it though, because it was around that time that my son stopped making wet diapers–meaning, essentially, that my boobs were starving him. They had one job to do, and between the two of them they couldn't produce enough milk to keep a seven-pound human alive. So we bought formula and bottles, called in lactation consultants, rented a pump.

I began taking massive doses of herbs I'd never heard of and a medicine that I had to buy on-line from Canada. I could hardly go an hour without bursting into tears. I had wanted this baby so badly, and now my own body was refusing to feed him. My breasts had gone from being my least favorite body part to a symbol of my failure at womanhood.

It was the lactation consultant who put all the pieces together: the empty-looking breasts, the light, irregular periods, the infertility. The same hormonal imbalance that prevented me from ovulating without assistance was also at fault for the arrested development of my breasts. There was even an ugly, clinical name for it: breast hypoplasia, which can actually occur in women with both big or small breasts.

I imagined my adolescent self in her padded bikini hearing in those words and the confirmation that there was, indeed, something wrong with her.

And while I felt, at best, dismissive of the breasts that had brought me only disappointment, my son adored them. To him, they weren't misshapen and useless. To him, they were comfort, even though I was only able to produce about half of the milk my son needed.

While I'll never feel at peace about my limited ability to nurse my children, I have, finally, reached a place of gratitude for my breasts.

They didn't make a lot of milk, but they did nurse two babies. And once I stopped hating them so much, I realized that there were a few advantages to having very small breasts. I could often nurse unnoticed in public, and I could nurse in every position imaginable—football hold, side-lying, even while walking down the street. I can go jogging without a sports bra. And they'll never sag.

They won't ever be the perfectly round breasts that I grew up longing for, but, for a time, whenever one of my babies was tired or hurt or sick, they were the very thing that someone needed.

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